Employment & Workforce Development

Case Study

The Herman J. Russell Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship is a 50,000 SF campus in one of Atlanta’s fast growing downtown neighborhoods that is focused on black entrepreneurship. The program will involve professors from local universities like Emory, Morehouse, Georgia Tech, Kennesaw State, and Georgia State. The Russell Center is an incubator for tech companies and operating businesses with physical products or content through its Launch Pad Innovation Studio. Four thousand square feet of the building will be reserved so entrepreneurs can host banks, institutional investors, angels and government entities. Along with financing from the Russell family and a grant from the EDA, the center will be sustainable through offering memberships.

Links to relevant articles:

Case Study

The Sorenson Impact Center partnered with the Utah Association of Counties to support communities throughout UT, launched the OZ Catalysts in partnership with Forbes, and is a thought leader in the Opportunity Zones. The U.S. Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration awarded a grant to the Sorenson Impact Center at the University of Utah and the Utah Association of Counties to create a rural Opportunity Zone and Recovery Playbook that will support local efforts to increase capital investment in Utah communities. The Rural Opportunity Zone and Recovery Playbook goal is to support rural counties with the insight, knowledge, and expertise to attract opportunity zone investments into the communities where they are needed most. Over the course of the grant’s two-year funding period, the project will work toward stimulating and supporting impact-oriented job creation in 21 Utah counties and 16 opportunity zones.

Links to relevant articles:

Case Study

Between 1996 and 2003, the University of Pennsylvania tripled the dollar amount of goods and services purchased from West Philadelphia businesses through their Economic Inclusion Initiative. They continue to focus on local purchasing and aim to award 20 percent of all construction contracts to minority or women-owned businesses. The University has also made great investments in Philadelphia’s neighborhoods by adding 3,800 new street trees and 850 new pedestrian street lights to residential and commercial streets. Penn supports public education by contributing over $800,000 to the neighboring Sadie Alexander Mossell Elementary School and providing landscaping services and security & expertise from Penn’s Graduate School of Education. Penn supports a variety of programs towards preparing Philadelphia’s future workforce, including training minorities to apprentice with local building trade unions and investing in the West Philadelphia Skills Initiative to align unemployed West Philadelphians with opportunities in local anchor institutions. The University funds forgivable loans enabling 1,000 participants to homes in the neighborhood near the school. By investing $150 million in retail development, Penn attracted approximately $1 billion in private investment from the real estate sector. This investment has established vibrant, pedestrian-friendly retail corridors consisting of 450,000 square feet of large and small businesses and created connections between the campus and neighborhood.

Links to relevant articles:

Case Study

RU-N has invested many resources to bettering Newark including:

The Cornwall Center facilitating the Newark City of Learning Collaborative, a cross-sector partnership to significantly raise postsecondary educational attainment in Greater Newark.
The creation, under the leadership of Chancellor Diner, of the Office of University Community Partnerships, embodies RU-N’s first institutionalized efforts to broker connections between the university and Greater Newark communities, addressing critical needs across the age spectrum from early literacy to teen parenting to healthy aging, among others.
Faculty from supply chain management collaborating with local industries and agencies as well as the Brookings Institution to document the robustness and still untapped potential in Newark’s manufacturing sector.
Criminal justice and policing experts working with law enforcement at all levels to improve safety and security in Newark.
Law faculty and students advocating for local families struggling to assure that their children with disabilities have access to the supports needed for them to succeed in school.
Faculty, staff, and students working on the Promise Neighborhood project with community-based organizations to build comprehensive support networks for families in Newark’s most challenged neighborhoods.
Scholars of urban entrepreneurship advising local startups to launch, revitalizing downtown.

The Center for Urban Entrepreneurship & Economic Development (CUEED) at RU-N is one of the first centers of its kind to integrate scholarly works with private capital, government, and non-profit sectors to develop citywide resources and bring renewed economic growth and vitality through urban entrepreneurship. The center promotes and fosters a new generation of urban entrepreneurs who actively seek a “socially conscious urban renaissance.” Their mission is to build a world-class research-driven, teaching and practitioner-oriented urban entrepreneurship and economic development program that will transform the economy of the City of Newark, New Jersey, and other urban centers; create wealth in urban communities; and be a model for all urban universities.

Links to relevant articles:

Case Study

Northeastern launched the region’s first university-supported loan program for women- and minority-owned businesses. The initiative, called the Impact Lending program, enables local small-business owners to secure loans, at below-market interest rates, to acquire crucial resources to expand their businesses. Northeastern has committed $2.5 million in seed funding, which will allow for a revolving fund of $6.5 million in loans. The university has partnered with Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC), a nonprofit that provides loans and advisory services to underserved small businesses.

Links to relevant articles:

Case Study

The Greater University Circle Initiative coordinates three large anchor institutions located in Cleveland’s University Circle area—about one-square mile of educational, cultural, and health institutions. Through this initiative, the Cleveland Clinic, University Hospitals, and Case Western Reserve University networked and deployed their resources in a powerful challenge to the persistent poverty and disinvestment in seven surrounding neighborhoods. This strategy pushes against gentrification by seeking to improve the prospects and income of the 60,000 people who live in these neighborhoods. The Greater University Circle Initiative seeks to connect community networks, in part through community engagement, to improve the quality of life in surrounding neighborhoods, and to give residents a greater voice and connection to the resources of the anchor institutions. It is led by the Cleveland Foundation, the world’s first community foundation. Their goals are broadly identified as: Hire Local, Live Local, Buy Local, and Connect.

Buy Local—increase opportunities for anchor institutions to purchase goods and services locally, and help small businesses increase their capacity to meet these needs
Hire Local—expand efforts by anchors to hire residents from the neighborhoods, and help improve the local workforce system;
Live Local—support and improve the employer-assisted housing program, Greater University Circle, and leverage it to help create more stable neighborhoods.
Connect—the key to all of these efforts, using the resources and skills of organizations such as Neighborhood Connections, a grassroots grant-maker, as well as other intermediaries such as Towards Employment and Ohio Means Jobs (workforce investment board), Cleveland Neighborhood Progress (community development), BioEnterprise, MidTown, University Circle Inc., and the Economic and Community Development Institute (small business support).